The $45,000 monument, which consists of four large granite slabs embedded in the ground and etched with the names of the dead, has sparked controversy because it includes the name of Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones among the 917 other people who died.

Jones is the reviled leader who culled much of the Jonestown population from religious and activist communities in the wake of the civil rights movement.

He is held responsible for brainwashing hundreds of people, many of whom wanted simply to keep building a better world, and forcing them to commit suicide on the day Rep. Leo Ryan, of San Mateo, arrived to investigate and was assassinated.

A Southern California pastor who lost 27 family members at Jonestown sued to block the memorial, but last week, a superior court judge sided with a group of memorial supporters including Jim Jones’ son, saying the service should go on with Jones’ name etched in stone.

For many, the mass murder-suicide in 1978 tarnishes otherwise happy memories from life on the commune in Guyana.

“Unfortunately, Jim Jones became a madman and he destroyed all those lives,” survivor Herbert Newell said.

Newell has 11 family members on the memorial and says Jones’ name should be among them.

“I don’t see why not. He was a part of it. He was a leader of it, but people go wrong you know, in life. All of us wouldn’t have been there if it wouldn’t a been for him,” he said.

The memorial to the Jonestown victims is open to the public at Evergreen Cemetery, 6450 Camden St. in Oakland.

A woman who lost 27 family members in the 1978 Jonestown Massacre has sued an Oakland cemetery association and its top officers, claiming that after she spent 18 years raising money to build a monument to the victims, the cemetery pulled a switch and decided to erect a different monument, based on a design from Jones’ People’s Church, which “proposes to include the name of Jim Jones himself as a victim of the Jonestown Massacre-Suicides.”

Jynona Norwood and her nonprofit, the Guyana Tribute Foundation, sued The Evergreen Cemetery Association, its president Buck Kamphausen, and its executive director Ron Haulman, in Alameda County Court. […]

Norwood says most of her family members who died at Jonestown are buried at the Evergreen mass grave site.

Since 1980, Norwood has been holding annual public memorials at Evergreen to honor the victims of the massacre. She says that for decades she has been trying to erect a memorial wall with the names of the 918 victims at the Evergreen Cemetery, and that she planned to exclude Jim Jones’ name from the memorial.

According to the complaint, the “defendants orally agreed that they would be agreeable to, and willing to assist in, the building of a memorial wall honoring the victims of the Jonestown Massacre-Suicides.”

Norwood says that after she received a proposal from a monument company, the “defendants notified plaintiff that they would permit the construction of the memorial wall only if plaintiff used their preferred vendor, called Marin Monument Company Inc., working through Amador Memorial Company.

However, “On or about December 15, 2009, defendants wrote a letter to Norwood wherein they alleged, among other things, that the memorial wall had never been approved and that it was too large.”

Then, in March this year,

“Plaintiffs discovered by reading a news article that defendants had approved plans for another monument to be erected on the base and setting originally approved for plaintiffs’ memorial wall. This monument is proposed by the surviving People’s Church, led by [Jim Jones’ adopted son] Jim Jones, Jr., and proposes to include the name of Jim Jones himself as a victim of the Jonestown Massacre-Suicides.” (Emphasis in complaint.)

Norwood says the defendants misappropriated the money she raised for the memorial and “defrauded plaintiffs of the use of a sacred site which plaintiffs have used for years to honor the victims of the Jonestown Massacre-Suicides.”

Norwood seeks compensatory and punitive damages for breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud. And she wants the defendants enjoined from building a memorial that honors Jim Jones “upon the mass grave site where most of the 305 children that Jim Jones ordered to be murdered are buried.”

The person who posted this video to YouTube writes, David Miscavige, the leader of the Church of Scientology has strange and dangerous simliarities with Jim Jones, former leader of the People’s Temple, who killed 909 people on Nov. 18th, 1977
• Scientology • Peoples Temple[Read more...]

At the 32nd annual Jonestown memorial, held at an Evergreen Cemetery mass grave for Peoples Temple victims, a schism among mourners led to competing ceremonies – one led by a woman who lost 27 family members in the mass suicide in Guyana, the other by Jim Jones Jr. [Read more...]

Today in 1978: A total of 912 people die in Jonestown, Guyana, after People’s Temple cult leader Jim Jones convinces most followers to kill themselves by drinking cyanide-laced punch. Others are shot to death or forcibly poisoned. [Read more...]